Interesting Questions

[Surlethe]

From what I've seen so far in mathematics, there's the concept of an "interesting question", as opposed to an "uninteresting question": a question which has a non-trivial answer and which, when answered, sheds light on various connections or concepts. For example, the question of the relationship between the lengths of the sides of a right triangle is interesting (albeit long solved); similarly, the question of how to define the real numbers is interesting. The question of what 2+2 equals is generally uninteresting.

What's interesting (no pun intended ...) is that this isn't a formal definition; instead, it's a general understanding. From what I've seen, a mathematician has to arrive at an intuitive grasp of how to divide interesting questions from uninteresting ones. It's also a rather big deal in choosing research and what to think about: after all, nobody wants to read uninteresting research and trivial results.

So, my question is, do other fields of research have this same sort of primitive concept? If so, how much of a role does it play in the various sciences? If you were a student of those sciences, how long did it take you to pick up an idea of what "interesting" means, and be able to apply it?

[SeeingRed]

I think all of the fields of study have SOME concept of "interesting" vs "uninteresting" questions, but Mathematics probably formalizes it to a much higher degree. In all cases I think the distinction would lie in the practical or theoretical applicability of the question to both the pursuits of the field itself, as well as to the society at large.

In science, I think we can very easily say that there is a concept of interesting vs uninteresting questions - and it manifests itself most prominently in the practice of the various journals of accepting and rejecting articles for publication: in large part the decision is driven by the applicability/impact the research has for the field a/o society at large.

As for the question of discriminating between what questions are likely to be interesting vs not interesting, as a researcher myself I'd say it's chiefly intuition, based on the sum total of your past experiences and knowledge of the field. In many ways, it's a trial and error thing.

[Darth Wong]

In engineering, we have the luxury of being totally unconcerned with the question of whether a solution is intellectually "interesting" or not. The key word for us is "useful", not "interesting".

[SeeingRed]

In engineering, we have the luxury of being totally unconcerned with the question of whether a solution is intellectually "interesting" or not. The key word for us is "useful", not "interesting".

Hear, hear.

[slebetman]

Well, in engineering you have trivial and non-trivial problems. Trivial problems have generally been solved, have rules of thumbs and can be automated. Nontrivial problems generally involves things that haven't been done before. It should be noted that sometimes scale and constraints can make normally trivial problems non-trivial. Also, designing systems to automatically solve trivial problems is often itself non-trivial.

[Ravencrow]

In infectious disease research, I think we are concerned with what is useful, rather than what is interesting. Interesting is the mechanism by which a disease spreads, useful would be how to interfere with that mechanism to stop the infection. A model that predicts how influenza spreads is definetly interesting, but usefulness would be how it predicts the spread if factors such as people movement and vaccine availablity are thrown in. When writing our project proposals, we tend to emphasize usefulness rather than "for interest".

[Middleclass]

Honestly, the subject of trivial vs. non-trivial questions is what got me into economics way back when I was a freshman at college. In econ, damn near everything is non-trivial due to the staggering amount of variables that you can involve. Some of the most simplistic sounding questions (Why is theatre popcorn so expensive? Why are concert tickets so cheap?) provide a lot of insight into economic theory.